Sourcing the RSS Drain

mrG — Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:59:25 -0500

Seems I've found the smoking gun draining my bandwidth over the RSS feeds, and it's ironic that the airplay I get comes from a Radio Userland Blog who likely learned about it from a blogroll tuned to my feed:

There was a discussion around this topic about a year ago that seemed to lead to a satisfactory solution, but this muddies the waters. Is the problem confined to Drupal-served feeds?

The culprit is definately not Drupal. That much is clear. Drupal may be strict on the spec, but that's not even being tested in what is really going awry: The culprit appears to be the vast majority of RSS reading clients who use the HTTP GET operator instead of using HEAD first ... and the biggest offender appears to be Radio Userland! (may not be them, they are just the most numerous agent fetching this feed and their numbers approximately match the bytes served)

UPDATE: drat ... just refined my test procedure and sure enough, 304 replies from my feed are devoid of the body, just as specified in the RFC 2616, the world going according to plan.

TeledyN - Sourcing the RSS Drain - Comments

Sourcing the RSS Drain